We Have A Lot of Stuff Going On Here

“Mommy, I have a lot of stuff going on here,” my daughter complains, staring at the screen of her iPad during distance learning, a scene that’s become all too familiar in our house. Remnants from a full morning of schooling—papers, crayons, snack wrappers, a whiteboard—are scattered across her desk: a very literal visual of a lot of stuff going on over here. I wander over and watch as she stumbles over some of the longer words in an assignment’s written instructions.

I look at her screen, at the bevy of assignments related to sight words and skip counting and something called fact families. I swipe down on the screen to view the directions.

“You can listen to the instructions,” I tell her. The first-grade teachers have prepared for the exact situation, of their still-young readers being overwhelmed by large blocks of text, “Remember? Press play right here. It will tell you exactly what to do next.”

I tiptoe away so I don’t interrupt her brother’s voice recording. I sit down at my own computer screen in the kitchen, far enough away I can’t see them, but close enough to be interrupted if they need me, which is approximately every 2.65 minutes. I look at my own screen with six tabs too many open and find similar words bouncing around my own brain.

What was I doing?
Where was I?
I’ve got a lot of stuff going on here.

Unlike my daughter, I don’t have an older, wiser person nearby to help me figure it all out. There’s no one around to check that I’ve done my work, for me to interrupt every couple of minutes to ask what I need to do next. Also, I’m 33 years old. In the language of the millennial memes I see around me, it’s my job to get this adulting done on my own.

But adulting is frequently the actual last thing I want to do. At my worst, when I’m feeling anxious and lazy and anything but capable, this devolves into a social media doomscroll on my phone. Or I wander around, half-completing tasks, as I wait out the minute or two or five I have before the inevitable interruption that is distance learning with three kids.

Read more about “all the stuff we have going on here” over on Twin Cities Mom Collective.

Goodbye Daniel Tiger

"No. I hate Daniel Tiger,” my six-year-old son mumbled in protest to his twin sister’s screen time selection.

“No you don’t!” I insisted to him in surprise.

“Yes I do,” he muttered back.

I have a soft spot for Daniel Tiger. It’s one of the kid’s shows I not only tolerate but enjoy. I’ve found myself significantly invested in the character’s storylines. I’ve come up with my own theories about the characters. (FYI Katerina Kittycat and Prince Wednesday are totally hooking up in the future.) And, when you can get beyond the unbelievable and compulsive patience of Mom Tiger, you discover there are lessons to be found as a parent, as well. 

There’s also the fact that Daniel Tiger was the first show the twins ever cared to watch consistently, when they were smaller, when I was desperate for just a few moments to myself. 

Caden and Brooklyn were 15 months old when I discovered I was pregnant again. Morning sickness never comes for me, but enormous and all-consuming amounts of fatigue do. Despite almost never using the TV before, I began to force it on them. I tried in vain to get them to watch something—anything—so I could lay on our microfiber couch and pretend to parent.

They weren’t interested. All my “no screentime before two” zeal seemed to have backfired.

Within a few months of expecting our third baby in two years, we were also moving. And my husband worked out-of-state. He didn’t live with us for any stretch longer than four days for four straight months, with our move planted firmly in the middle of that timeline. I needed backup any way I could get it.

I don’t remember how I came across Daniel Tiger, but I do remember realizing the twins were paying attention to it. Their usually active bodies stilled, their eyes glowed. My breath, though not all at one, began to release. First they were taken in by the songs, then drawn into the storyline for minutes at a time. Little by little, their interest grew. This is when they learned to embrace Daniel Tiger, half an episode at a time that fall, while my belly grew with their sibling and I learned to pack up our apartment in twelve-minute spurts.

Read the rest of this piece over on Coffee+Crumbs.

On Figuring Things Out Again. We've Got This.

On March 12th, my kids tumbled off the school bus for spring break. I don’t have any photos from that day. I looked, but only found a collection of screenshots on my phone. An article I texted to my parents where I’d underlined the part urging people over the age of 60 to stay away from restaurants, movie theaters, and other public places. A meme I remember texting to a friend that reads “Today I completed a chore I’ve put off for six months. It took 15 minutes. I will learn nothing from this.” (Hi, who can relate?)  Another article announcing that Tom Hanks and his wife had been diagnosed with COVID-19. I don’t have a record of what we wore or what we ate that day, but I do remember the gut-level feeling I had in the pit of my stomach, a feeling that knew already what would be confirmed by our school district in the coming weeks: they wouldn’t return to school to finish out the year.

I have plenty of photos for the rest of March. Most are of the kids around our house, sitting at the kitchen table for schoolwork, playing in the living room, running around the backyard in the unseasonably warm spring weather. 

We figured it out. Spring Break was extended a week and then distance learning kicked in. The kitchen table became our schoolroom. We learned how to use Seesaw and my first quarantine purchase was a new printer so we could print pages of worksheets. We did math problems on the sidewalk using chalk. YouTube yoga videos in the living room became gym class. We journaled about distance learning for literacy and planted seeds and called it science.

March feels like a lifetime ago. At the same time, it feels impossible to find ourselves in September. So much has changed in seven months. It’s time for us to figure things out again. 

I’ve been reading through emails to learn all over what elementary school will look like. We did this just last year, as my twins began Kindergarten. We learned a new school and a new routine, a new teacher and how to eat lunch in the cafeteria, how to ride the bus and how to find their classroom. This year those routines have been upended. This year I’ll be driving and picking them up from a different door, they’ll have a different classroom, they’ll be wearing masks, they’ll be sitting distanced from their friends in the cafeteria. Virtually everything we learned about their school a year ago has changed. Three days a week they’ll be learning from home. As I write this on September 7th, we don’t yet know what distance learning looks like, except that it will be very different from our routine last spring. We have desks and iPads and crayons and pencils at the ready.

Read the rest over on the Twin Cities Mom Collective.

When the Light Isn't Where I Left It

I’ve been mulling over the idea of going where the light is.

The thing is, that light? Where it is changes for me. As often as my emotions, maybe, these days. What brings me joy one day (one hour, one moment) can be anathema to me the next. 

Sometimes my kids are the light and the next minute I want to ship them off to Siberia. Sometimes cooking is the thing that steadies me and the next meal I don’t want to chop another vegetable, fry another egg, or mix together flour, water, salt, and yeast ever again. Sometimes I can’t get away fast enough to type up the words in my head and other times I look at an empty page, certain I won’t have anything to say ever again in my entire life. Sometimes I’m so glad Tyson is here and we’re in this together and other times I want to self-quarantine myself away from him. Sometimes I find hope in the grocery store, in the fact that I’m out— free! —from my house. Other times it’s the most depressing place in the world as I walk around and realize we can’t even see each other’s smiles anymore underneath our masks. Sometimes I find the light in the normal, ordinary routine of our days. Other days I want to scream in frustration at the mundane and instead find joy in wearing a nice top and jewelry, in hosting snack time on the front porch, ordering lunch for myself just because.

You see my problem here. It can make things difficult, this finding of the light. It’s not always where I’ve left it.

Still. As I mull this whole “go where the light is” idea over, Albus Dumbledore keeps popping into my head.

“Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.”

I don’t only need to turn it on these days. I need to actively search for it.

It’s there. I (almost) always find it. Even when it’s not where I’ve found it before.

That breakfast light, though.

A real breakfast with a side of comfort reading.

School as an anchor in our day.

Just look how studious they are.

Unscheduled coffee break.

Unscheduled jump-off-the-Nugget-free-for-all break.

Chaos.

A teacher who captivates them with her videos as tulips listen in.

Lunch delivery. Just for me.

Happy sidewalk art.

Buds budding. The bluest of skies.

Friends who also live in your house.

Snacktime in the living room. (Previously absolutely, positively 1000% forbidden. Here we are.)

Friends who live in your house part 2. This time with LEGOs.

Cheers.

Impromptu PJ dance party.

The magic of books.

That evening light, though.

Flowers reaching toward the light, even as it fades away.

This post was written as part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to read the next post in this series "Go Where the Light Is".

The Spirited Child Chronicles

“But at least you aren’t trying to squash him down,” Mrs. Whatsit nodded her head vigorously. “You’re letting him be himself.” (A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L’Engle)

I have what we’ll call a “spirited” child. 

At his preschool conference this fall, his teacher greeted my husband and me and asked, as we took a seat, “So how do you think the school year is going?”

I burst out laughing, “You tell me!” I said, “With my other two kids, I know exactly what the teacher is going to say. But not with this one. It’s either going to be one extreme or the other!”

It was the teacher’s turn to laugh. “Yeah, we never know which version we’re going to get each day,” she said, “Nolan is either a perfect angel or bursting with energy!”

It reminded me of a time a friend watched my kids for an afternoon. Her own were the same age as mine — almost four and almost two at the time. When I picked them up I asked, “So how did it go?”

“Oh, he was good,” she said in reference to Nolan, “I mean, he wasn’t bad at all." She fumbled for words. "He just has so much energy! I couldn’t stop for a second. You must be exhausted at the end of the day!”

I was. I am. Every day. Even once the sleepless nights of infancy abated we entered the toddler years and I felt more exhausted than ever. The amount of energy it took to follow him around the playground, to make sure he didn’t dash out into the street, to ensure he stayed in the children’s area at the library and that he didn’t intentionally knock over anyone’s block tower took every ounce of energy I had.

I collapsed at night, never fully able to recoup all the energy I’d put out that day, the energy I needed to get through the next one full of his need for stimulation and excitement and movement and discovery. 

I could have wept at my friend’s words. I’d wondered before if I was crazy. Maybe I was just burned out from raising his older brother and sister. Maybe everyone else felt this way. Maybe he wasn’t as energetic as I thought he was. Maybe I only thought I was the only one chasing after my toddler at the park, at the library, at the mall. But my friend had seen it, too, his unrelenting energy. I wasn’t crazy. 

He is just, by nature, a lot.

Photo credit: Prall Photography

Read the rest about my spirited child over on the Twin Cities Moms Collective.